Predicting Employee Burnout Using ONA & Email Data

PREDICTING EMPLOYEE BURNOUT USING ONA & EMAIL DATA

Research shows that in today’s network-centric, knowledge-centric and collaborative enterprise, employee burnout is the biggest threat to building an engaged workforce. Employee disengagement has a huge impact on productivity and overall business success. Preventing employee burnout has become a priority for business and human resource leaders. However, identifying at-risk employees has always been difficult because traditional HR data, which can be subjective and often out of date, is of limited value in predicting employee burnout.

Leveraging Organizational Network Analysis, TrustSphere has found that employee burnout is often caused by divisional and individual behavior patterns. TrustSphere’s People Analytics can identify at risk behaviors by assessing an employee’s network, collaboration and key relationships.

As corporate email is the most common form of business communication, TrustSphere’s proprietary algorithms analyzes email meta data to measure the variables that influence whether an employee is at risk of burnout. TrustSphere uses objective behavioral metrics to identify influential variables such as; over collaboration, line manager effectiveness, time management and employee productivity.

TrustSphere’s People Analytics measure and thus identify these four variables that can lead to employee burnout:

Sending a lot of emails outside working hours – by setting a benchmark for a team’s “normal” working hours, those who spend more time outside working hours sending emails can be identified. This provides a simple indicator of employees who might lack work-life balance.

Being constantly interrupted– looking at how often an employee sends emails during their day, we can see how “in command” they are of their working time. The less often an employee is interrupted, the more time they are fully focused on their work tasks.

Involved in too many simultaneous conversations – high levels of collaboration are good, but it reaches a point where too many working relationships can actually hinder work. Excessive collaboration is shown to reduce productivity.

Having a network that’s larger than your managers– one of the key roles of an effective line manager is to act as a gatekeeper between their team and the rest of the organization. When a manager’s network is smaller than their employees, the employee can end up in the stressful role of unofficial team leader.